Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique for recovering waste liquid, such as ink and process liquid, in ink-jet printers.
Description of the Related Art
Ink in ink-jet printers that have not been used for a long time can become thick, resulting in the failure of ejection through nozzles. To prevent this, a recovery operation for recovering the state of the nozzles is performed by forcedly absorbing the ink from out of the nozzles. The absorbed ink is disposed of as waste liquid.
A printer disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-131868 includes a container for waste liquid and an opening at the head of the container for receiving the waste liquid dropping from above into the container. The printer further includes an automatic shutter for opening and closing the opening. If the power of the printer is turned off or if the printer is inclined, the shutter is automatically closed to prevent the liquid from leaking through the opening.
However, the configuration disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2005-131868 is equipped with a large-scale mechanism including a driving source and a gear train for driving the automatic shutter of the container, and it is difficult to achieve size reduction of the printer. Furthermore, since the shutter in the above configuration is exposed from the head of the container by a large amount, the user can touch the shutter by mistake when detaching the container from the printer.